Digital PR Case Study: Proprietary Data
Ausbildung.de
Digital PR Case Study: Interne Daten
Turning Job Data into Direction: The 2026 Apprenticeship Barometer
The Challenge
As an apprenticeship platform, Ausbildung.de sits on a data asset that few others can match: real data on apprenticeship supply from more than one million job ads, tracked month by month and down to city level, offering new insights into regional and seasonal trends. The challenge was to turn this extensive dataset into a story that is socially relevant, constructive and appealing to editors, while keeping Ausbildung.de’s positioning as an optimistic, solution-oriented voice in the apprenticeship market.
Alarmist narratives such as “the apprenticeship market is collapsing” were ruled out from the start. Instead, the analysis was meant to show clearly where the opportunities lie, speaking to young people and decision-makers alike. Another key strategic goal was to establish Ausbildung.de as a citable, authoritative source of data on the apprenticeship market, both in the media and in AI-generated search answers.
The solution
We built the 2026 Apprenticeship Barometer around three questions that matter most when starting a career: Which apprenticeship occupations have been advertised most often recently, and when? Where is it worth searching, even outside the big cities? And in which cities offerings recently grown most strongly?
- Structuring and analyzing more than one million internal records of job ads from May 2025 to May 2026
- Developing comparative metrics: seasonal patterns and trends, openings per 1,000 residents, and top apprenticeship occupations by city
- Designing a landing page with all key findings and data visualizations, including an interactive map of Germany
- Two-stage seeding: an exclusive pitch to a high-reach national outlet, followed by tailored seeding of city-specific results to regional media
The Execution
The landing page brings the most important data together, giving visitors a quick overview as well as direct access to the regional data that matters most to them. The centerpiece of the data visualization is an interactive map of Germany covering the 190 largest cities. Hovering over a city shows, among other things, its top five apprenticeship occupations. Seeding took place in two stages. We first pitched the story exclusively to the business magazine Business Punk, then published it through the IPPEN partner network in around 50 regional outlets, including Frankfurter Rundschau, Münchner Merkur and Westdeutscher Anzeiger. In the second stage, we approached newsrooms with results specific to their own city, which led to around 30 further clippings.
Landing page of the digital PR campaign
The results
During the campaign period, the 2026 Apprenticeship Barometer earned a total of 81 clippings, including 55 dofollow backlinks and 16 print clippings, among them a front-page story in the Hamburger Abendblatt and coverage in six local editions of the Rheinische Post.
Accompanying GEO tracking also showed that the campaign measurably boosted Ausbildung.de’s visibility in AI search assistants. For key questions about the regional apprenticeship market, such as which cities have the most apprenticeship openings or which occupations are advertised most often, Ausbildung.de’s brand visibility climbed to as high as 100 percent.
In practice, this means that when users asked LLMs about regional apprenticeship openings after the campaign launched, “Ausbildung.de” was the brand named most often, usually first, ahead of the Federal Employment Agency and competing platforms. The campaign thus succeeded in claiming the topic in LLMs as well. However, the drop in these figures after a few weeks shows that continuous media outreach is needed to maintain this presence in AI search engines over the long term.
About Ausbildung.de
Ausbildung.de is Germany’s leading digital platform for apprenticeships. It helps young people make informed decisions about starting their careers despite uncertainty, and offers the largest selection of apprenticeship openings on the market. For training companies, Ausbildung.de provides in-depth marketplace and target-group intelligence as well as personalized guidance to help them fill open apprenticeship positions with the right candidates. Backed by its extensive real-world market and decision data, Ausbildung.de also takes responsibility for putting the changes in the apprenticeship market into transparent, data-based context.
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